Tag: progressive blogs

At West Point last week, Obama said, “We’ll support Afghan ministries, governors, and local leaders that combat corruption and deliver for the people.  We expect those who are ineffective or corrupt to be held accountable.”  

David Broder must be freaking out.  It sounds like Obama is advising Afghans to exact retribution, engage in partisan witch hunts, have show trials, and turn their country into a banana republic.    

Why Is Obama Worried By Corruption in Afghanistan? . . .

Obama’s weakest position, in our view, has been his determination to “look forward, not backward” regarding the apparent crimes of the Bush administration. That stance has never made sense, and it makes even less sense now that Obama has announced plans to send 30,000 more U.S. troops into Afghanistan.

At the heart of the Obama plan is a push to root out corruption in Afghanistan. And that’s ironic because Obama has shown no interest in rooting out corruption here at home.   Why the surge in Afghanistan?  Obama hopes to stabilize the country and turn it over to the government of President Hamid Karzai. Unfortunately, the Karzai government is flagrantly corrupt, marked by cronyism and electoral fraud.

Sounds a lot like the Bush administration, doesn’t it?  But Obama wants Americans to forget all the pain that was inflicted upon our democracy over the past eight years.

If Obama actually gave a flying fuck about accountability, he’d bring the Predator drones home and fly them over Wall Street.  As soon as a corrupt CEO, banker, hedge fund manager or credit default swapper showed up in the street he’d get his ass blown to Hell.  Obama could call it winning the hearts and minds of the American people.  He could call it liberation. Francis Scott Key VII would see it from that Brooklyn homeless shelter he lives in and could write a song about it.  Here in the twilight’s last gleaming, we could finally get some useful results from our $900,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 defense budget.

Maybe I’m missing something here . . .  Did the Taliban destroy our economy?  Is the Taliban looting our Treasury?  Did the Taliban take control of Congress?  Is the Taliban using it as a weapon against us? Who’s doing all that?  

We all know who’s doing that.  So does Obama.  But there won’t be any Predator drones over Wall Street.  He won’t have a Predator or two following Dick Cheney around either. He’d rather let Dick strut around like the greatest warrior of all time and call him a traitor every day of the week and twice on Fox News Sunday.    

I don’t remember Mr. Five Deferments being red, white, and blue to the bone when the Vietnam War was raging.  I don’t remember him joining the Army because he had no place to go, I don’t remember him landing in Kandahar with an eagle and a flag tattooed on his arm. But he sure likes to give those warmongering speeches.   A fat man in a blue Mercedes drives him to the door, he pumps himself up like he’s Patton crossing the Rhine, scowls his message of endless war, and basks in the applause of every other psychopath in the room.    

Something about being a lying asshole all your life makes you hard that way.

If there’s still enough time, if it’s not too late, if you haven’t given up, if you can find the words, if you haven’t run out of words, if you haven’t been silenced, banned, exiled because too many Obamabots profusely supportive admirers of Barack at GOS and other bizarre locations don’t want to hear the truth, don’t want to deal with it, can’t bear to look at it, won’t acknowledge it because he is their last refuge, their final sanctuary, the only source of hope they have left in this betrayed wreck of a country.            

How many times do they have to see Obama stumble down the side of that Misty Moderate Mountain before these people realize he’s not the Moses of the Democratic Party, before they finally understand he’s not leading us to the Promised Land, he’s just plunging us deeper into the Valley of Centrism Death, where lies and self-delusion reign and the truth is never heard.  It shouldn’t be so hard for them to figure out how this is all going to end if progressives back down again, if we take one for the team again, if we let K Street’s bought and paid for hacks pass this healthcare “reform” atrocity.  

You don’t have to walk and crawl on six crooked highways for the rest of your life to know where we’ve been and where we’re going next, an IQ of 50 and two functioning eyes are all that’s necessary to confirm that those crooked highways are just an endless corporate tollway to nowhere and that it’s our job to keep paying for the trip.  

I know why you’re here . . .

You’re here because you know something.  What you know is hard to explain, but you feel it.  You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with America.  Something very wrong.  You know what it is, but no one in power will do anything about it.  And that frustrates you, your frustration is like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.  

I know what you’ve been doing . . . why you hardly sleep, why you live the way you do, and why day after day, you read progressive blogs.  You’re looking for him.  You’re looking for a progressive leader.  I know because I was once looking for the same thing.  And when he found me, he told me I wasn’t really looking for him.  I was looking for the leadership within me, the leadership within each of us.  

How do we achieve real change?  It’s the question that drives us.  It’s the question that brought you here. You know the question, just as I do.

But no one in power will ask it . . .

They’re afraid of the answer.  

So they keep taking the blue pill.  Most Americans are afraid of the answer too, so they keep taking the blue pill.   When Republicans are in power, it has an R on it.  When Democrats are in power, it has a D on it.  

But it’s the same blue pill.